Page 241 of The Enslaved Duet

I wanted to thank him, cry and hug him for lying in wait for Rodger so I could get gone, to tell him I loved him for putting himself at risk and that I loved him for being my friend when I didn’t have any left.

Instead, I ran.

I ran down the hall, not stopping or even flinching when I heard a crash and scream from behind me where Douglas and Rodger had clashed. I ran through the dark hall harder than I’d even run at The Hunt, so hard my bare feet split against the friction with the glossed floors and my toes threatened to slip in the blood. So hard I went careening into priceless paintings as I turned the corners. So hard my lungs seemed to seize, and I couldn’t really breathe, the tissues clasping around nothing but carbon.

Still, with an inevitably I felt at the back of my crazed mine like a premonition, Rodger caught me.

His hands appeared as if out of thin air, wrapping around my middle and hauling me to the ground from behind. I screamed, flipping as I fell so that I landed hard on my hip, but my legs were twisted briefly out of Rodger’s seeking grip. He looked up at me with seething eyes like a rabid dog.

I reared my leg back and kicked him square in his foaming mouth.

A garbled growl sounded, but I didn’t stop to watch him recover. I scrambled to my feet and searched manically for a weapon, foranythingto use against the boy who was close enough to a man in body and corrupt enough mind to do serious damage to my person. There was nothing but a side table decorated with an antique gold phone, paintings on the wall, and… the stuffed and mounted head of a stag.

I jumped up to grasp the antlers in my hands, screaming as Rodger crawled forward and grabbed at one of my ankles, pulling me toward the ground. I leaned down into his momentum even though I knew if I ended up on the ground with him without a weapon, I was dead. His force helped me pull the large head from the wall, and I went tumbling to the ground with it, narrowly missing being impaled by one of the grand points.

Rodger grabbed at my ankle again, tugging me closer as he grunted, “You miserable, filthy whore, I’m going to fuck you with my hands around your pathetic throat until you—”

I reared up, using every ounce of my core strength to bring the mounted head up over my head and down into Rodger’s exposed, arched back.

There was a sickening soft sound like something punching into an old couch cushion and then a thud as the tip of the antler broke through his body and knocked against the floor. Rodger stared up at me in disbelief, his face so young, his eyes wide as they began to tear. His hand spasmed, then loosened around my foot.

I didn’t stay to watch if he would die.

I scrambled backward on my hands and feet, then spun around to dash off down the hall again on legs wobbly with shock. Still, I ran, almost drunkenly, so fast it hurt, down the narrow corridor that cut straight through the house from front to back.

Finally, I burst out one of the back entrances to the house and fell into the damp night, the air like ice against my moist, hot skin. I stared at the haloed edge of light spilling from the house into the huge abyss of blackness beyond.

There was a sound behind me that spurred me forward like a gunshot at the starting line.

I ran blind, my eyes streaming with tears, my hair a dark cloak behind me the same colour as the intractable night. The dirt ground painfully into the cuts on my feet and shrubs tore at the bare skin of my arms as I pumped them manically at my sides.

Finally, I could make some sense of the dark, enough to realize with dread I felt like a dropped anchor in my stomach, that I had somehow made it into the maze on the east side of the property.

The same maze Noel had just confessed to burying the bodies of his slaves in.

The body of his wife.

My body too, if I didn’t find a way out of the labyrinth.

Frantically, as I dodged around a bend in the hedgerows, I tried to recall everything Alexander had told me about the property and about the elaborate maze.

Constructed by Capability Brown in the late 1700s, it was one of Pearl Hall’s greatest sights and one that had stared at me through the windows of my bedroom during my entire time in captivity. There were two exits, one at either side, with a center spoke where a collection of Grecian marble statues lay. It was a massive maze, thousands of yew bushes used to make up the paths and dead ends in the pattern.

A sob exploded from my panting mouth as I continued to run blindly through the collection of twists and turns, the branches tearing at all my exposed skin, the ground eating away at the flesh of my feet.

I ran, and I bled.

I sweated, and I cried.

And over it all, I heard the distant lilting call of my name.

“Ruthie,” Noel’s voice carried faintly over the wind, and the wet air streaming with drizzling rain. “Ruthie, you little bitch, if you come to me now, I promise not to kill you.”

Fresh panic sluiced through my waning body, kicking my gait into hyper speed. I gritted my teeth, ducked my head into the rain, and ran harder still.

Only moments later, I reached the spoke at the center of the yew wheel and crashed into the back of a statue so hard I saw stars. Reeling, I walked clumsily farther into the middle, at the center of the circle of marble carved Grecian gods, and then fell to my knees as my balance deserted me.

I pushed my damp, clinging hair out of my face and looked at the six places the maze connected to the center, trying to discern which one might lead me to the far entrance and which one I had just stumbled out of, but my mind was scrambled by the crash and overcooked with terror.